How can you tell you've found a top SEO consultant? The best SEO consultant will audit your website thoroughly so he or she knows everything about your SEO strategy as well as the condition of your website for both the user experience and the robot (search engine) experience. He or she will want facts before throwing around pricing so analyzing the data collected in the audit is the first step. No SEO professional can "fix" a website without knowing what needs to be fixed. A baseline must be established.
Finding the right consultant can be like trying to nail Jello to a tree, herding cats or getting teenagers to listen to their parents.
Which consultants know what they're doing and which ones are just scheming to collect a fee?
Yes, I said it…it happens in our industry and we all should be ashamed that it does.
This article will show you how to be sure that the SEO consultant that you hire is really good at search engine optimization and also knows how to convert site visitors to money for you.
SEO shouldn’t just be about getting your site found in the organic rankings. Yes, that’s incredibly important but if no one clicks through to your site it doesn’t help you. And going further, if the visitors don’t convert to leads, jobs and profit you again have no value from your SEO consultant.
Here are a few requirements that any top SEO consultant should meet:
- He has clients – don’t be the first business owner to use anyone calling himself an SEO consultant. No one wants the first car off the line of a brand new model – same reason you don’t want an inexperienced SEO consultant – you have no idea what you’re getting and the bugs may not be worked out yet.
- A top SEO consultant can audit your website and provide a report that details all levels of your site. A good SEO auditor will analyze every facet of your website including: the domain level, the page level, server issues, backlinks, the internal linking structure, the flow of your website, the navigation etc. Read this SEO audit checklist before hiring any SEO consultant and ask questions based on the list. A good understanding of the SEO audit process will keep you from hiring the wrong SEO consultant.
- He can show you significant rankings for many clients. 5 or 10 rankings for 2 or 3 clients is not significant. 50 to 300 for a dozen or more clients is significant.
- Any top SEO consultant should not be afraid to offer you the names and numbers of his some of his clients so that you can prove to yourself that his work turns into money for his clients and that they are having a good experience with him. A really talented SEO professional that is a real jerk to work with is not typically any fun. You have to work well together as a team or it’s not going to go well.
- He is certified in more than search engine marketing – in the ultra-competitive world of the Internet, a marketing education is imperative. Make sure he is certified in as many of the 8 disciplines of digital marketing as possible. Instead of hearing “sure I know that” – check his certifications and be certain they are from a reputable digital marketing training institution.
- He has a team and is not working alone. One person cannot provide top notch results or service to more than a small handful of clients. A one man band often ends up shorting his clients because he doesn’t have enough help or time to do the job right.
- He knows how to retarget and remarket to site visitors after they leave. Make sure you see proof. It’s really easy for someone to say “sure I can do that” but really doing it well is another animal…a really profitable animal for you.
- He is well versed in social media marketing – not just posting a couple of links to blog posts on a Facebook page or Twitter feed. He actually knows how to use social media to attract people that know nothing about you yet and can also use it to bring people back to your site once they leave. Ask him how he would use social media to distribute content.
- He can show you marketing funnels that he has created on active sites.
- A top SEO consultant understands conversion rate optimization and can prove that to you.
- His data analysis skills go beyond Google Analytics and search console.
If you really want to compete online in today’s world, these are the minimum requirements to look for in a top SEO consultant.
SEO is far more advanced today than it was even 5 years ago. There was a time when using WordPress to build your site, writing some pretty good content, creating good Meta titles and tags and building some links was enough.
The competition is so intense today for nearly any valuable search term that you need to not only optimize well but also market like a pro. That’s’ why we insist that any top SEO consultant be certified in digital marketing.
An SEO consultant that is also a certified digital marketing professional has a higher skill level and has had to prove that in order to become certified. For instance, our president has studied for several hundred hours and passed 9 difficult exams to become certified in digital marketing. Our vice-president of marketing has done the same. Our social media director is certified in social media marketing and our vice president of tech services is certified in search engine marketing and soon to be data analysis and conversion rate optimization.
Why do we invest the time and considerable money in training like this? So that we can return a higher ROI for our clients than other SEO consultants can.
Your success is very important to us. We take great pride in helping your business grow.
What are your goals concerning online success:
- Reach more consumers online
- Convert more site visitors to clients
- Increase your ROI from marketing investments
- Grow you top line revenue significantly
- Improve your bottom line
- Establish a multi-tier digital marketing program that will help you grow your business over the next 2, 3 or 5 years
- Use social media to create new business opportunities and improved customer service
- Manage your reputation online
- Improve your cash flow
No matter what your goals, our certified team of top SEO consultants can help make them a reality.
Start with a strategy session with one of our principles - who are top SEO consultants. Let’s lay out your goals and look at what you’ve done so far to reach them then we can define the right path to reach those goals. Once we reach your current goals we can start a new plan for further growth.
As some of the top SEO consultants in the industry we can help you grow your business
Business growth is the number one reason business owners hire us. Our team has worked with over 976 small to medium sized businesses of all disciplines to date and the vast majority came to us so that we could help them grow. Sometimes they have us perform the SEO and Internet marketing for them and sometimes they take our audit report and advice and do their own work. Either way, we help you grow your business.
There are 3 ways to grow a business:
- Increase new sales
- Increase average order size
- Increase sale frequency
Any top SEO consultant should know how to accomplish each of these things if they are truly going to help you achieve your goals. A solid SEO strategy is a key component in business growth but not the only strategy you may want to consider.
Along with SEO we utilize the following to achieve the 3 things necessary to grow your business:
- Content marketing
- Blogging
- Social media and social media marketing
- Video marketing and optimization
- Retargeting and remarketing
- Email marketing
- Marketing funnels
- Sales funnels
- Online advertising (when appropriate)
- Bundle creation
- Cross sell opportunities
- Upsell opportunities
We establish things like your earnings per visitor, average order value, earnings per click, click through rate, lift % and more. We’ll show you why these things are crucial to understanding and improving your ROI and understanding how much you can truly afford to invest in marketing.
Has your SEO consultant ever talked with you about any of these things? If you said no it’s time for a change.
A top SEO consultant should be able to tell you how he would design variants and create hypothesis, prove or disprove his hypothesis and implement the correct changes in order to better convert site visitors to leads, buyers, clients etc.
Have you ever used user surveys to better understand your client? They are a tremendous way to learn how to better serve your client base. This improves customer service and creates amazing upsell and cross sell opportunities.
Has your current SEO consultant talked with you about scroll tacking, eye tracking, or mouse tracking? Scroll tracking, eye tracking and mouse tracking show your SEO consultant exactly how your site visitors interact with your site. It’s much easier to find where you lose people if you can see and analyze this data and let’s face it, you can’t fix a problem that you can’t see.
A top SEO consultant working at this level isn’t for every company.
Not every business owners needs to know all of this information. If you are a one man firm, you probably just want to be sure that you are getting leads and selling your service. You may also not be able to invest in this level of service. We can work with smaller businesses with smaller needs at lower prices. So if you’re a small company give us a call and let’s see how we can help you too. Typically a smaller company can get extremely useful advice from us for less than $1000.
However, if you are a medium sized or larger company than this is exactly the level of service that you likely require from your SEO consultants.
As a larger company you will likely want to establish key progress indicators, or KPI’s, for each level of your marketing funnel.
The funnel that we create is 3 tier. Tier 1 is the top of funnel, where people first become aware of you and your business, tier 2 is the middle of funnel where they evaluate you as the solution to their problem or need, and tier 3 is the bottom of funnel where they convert to a client.
A truly top SEO consultant should establish KPI’s for each funnel stage independently, here are some sample metrics:
Top of funnel:
- Page clicks
- Social Shares
- Bounce reduction
- Time on site increased
- Number of people added to retargeting list
Middle of funnel:
- Leads generated
- Product added to cart (if applicable)
- Newsletter signs ups (if applicable)
- Webinar sign ups (if applicable)
- Brochure or information request
Bottom of funnel:
- Purchases made
- Average order value
- Revenue per customer
- Earnings per click
If you’re looking for an SEO consultant that truly understands how to drive traffic, increase conversions, improve ROI, find and fix disconnects with your site visitors and retarget them with marketing to bring them back so that you can sell them, call us. We can do all of this and help you grow your business to the level you, your boss, or board desire.
As one of the leading SEO consultants in the nation we are proud to say that we are an American SEO company and all of our work is done in the USA. We don’t outsource any of the work we do for you. We feel that it is not only important to support the US economy but we also have much greater control over our work when we have our eyes on it the entire time it’s being done. Thanks for considering us.